Carbon Copy
by perh0nen
Summary: After an accident leaves Taylor in a coma, Annette triggers as a tinker, and she's got a plan to save her daughter... (x-post from SB)
1. Chapter 1

"I- I just need a moment alone with her."

"Of course. Let us know when you're ready."

The assorted doctors and nurses filed out of the room, leaving just her and the girl. She settled into the chair by the bed awkwardly, setting her broken right arm on the armrest before reaching out with her left to take the girl's small, cold hand in her own. The room was still, but not silent. The ventilator whooshed, the heart monitor beeped, and her daughter died, bit by bit. Panacea had confirmed the worst over a month ago: irreversible loss of brain stem function. Brain death was one of the few things even the miracle worker couldn't fix.

She brushed a stray strand of hair off the girl's face, tucking it behind her ear. Dark curls, so much like her own. On TV shows they always said that coma patients looked 'so peaceful'. But she didn't look peaceful lying like this; no, she looked empty. She lay there with unnatural stillness - she'd never been this still in life, not even while sleeping. Medical equipment surrounded her. Screens flashed with acronyms and numbers and wave functions, while tubes ran down her throat. All to keep this shell alive, while the girl was already gone.

"I'm so sorry baby," she whispered.

She reached into her purse to retrieve the device. She didn't have long. She was a bereaved mother saying goodbye to her child, but the doctors would be back before long to carry out her decision. Struggling with one functional hand, she placed the device across the girls forehead and then tried to lift her head to loop it behind. She almost screamed in frustration when the device slipped and fell onto the bed. She tried again and managed to get it in place. It was a silver circlet about half an inch wide, inset with LEDs. It encircled the girl's brow, pressing tight at the temples.

The scan was an unpredictable, destructive process - even as it attempted to digitized the neural web, the brain would die in its wake. The PRT wouldn't have allowed it. So she hadn't told them. If this succeeded, it would be new territory philosophically, psychologically, morally. It would have taken months of time and money she didn't have to fight the PRT and the FDA in court to be allowed to attempt it. Months in which the her daughter's already damaged brain would deteriorate further and further, until there was nothing left to recover.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered again, as she leaned down to kiss the top of her head. Straightening up, she grabbed the girl's hand in her own again, and then activated the device. Green lights flickered, and a shiver seemed to run through the prone body. She squeezed the hand tighter as it began to twitch and spasm as neurons fired in cellular panic. This was the last gasp of a dying brain. Tears tracked down her face, blurring her vision. She tried to stay silent, but a soft moan escaped her lips. It was over in less than a minute.

With a trembling hand, she lifted the circlet off and stowed it back in her purse. She shut her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to ground herself and failing utterly. Then she walked over to the door and pushed it open and nodded mutely to the doctors outside. As they filed back in, she took a seat by the bed again. Following the doctors and nurses was a girl in a hooded white robe that had a red greek cross emblazoned on the front and back.

"What's she doing here?"

Panacea flinched slightly. The sentence had come out harsher than Annette had intended. She knew the girl couldn't help, and didn't blame her. But if Panacea touched the body now, what she had just done might be discovered.

"Her body will start to shut down as soon as the life support is ended. I can ease the transition, so she can pass peacefully." She raised her head, meeting Annette's gaze. "Do I have your permission to use my power?"

Annette hesitated, turning numbly to look at the body in the bed. It looked so small, so fragile. She deserved peace, whatever little Annette could give. She nodded to Panacea, and then turned to the doctors. "I'm ready."

They began removing tubes, unhooking monitors, and turning off the machines one by one until all that was left was the heart monitor and a morphine drip. Panacea stepped forward and lay a hand on the girl's arm. Almost immediately, she stiffened and turned to looks at Annette, who looked back at her with desperate, pleading intensity. _Don't say anything, please, please don't say anything._

To the others in the room it looked like she was begging for a last minute miracle, pleading for the impossible. They had seen that look a thousand times before. Only Panacea knew that something was amiss, and the she held the power here. Abruptly, she lifted her hand and backed away from the bed.

"I've done what I can," she said, keeping her voice level. "It shouldn't be too long now. I'm sorry for your loss." With that, she turned to leave.

"Thank you. Really."

The girl paused at the threshold of the door, a brief flash of curiosity playing across her face, before she nodded to Annette and left. One by one the doctors and nurses left as well, until she was alone. Fifteen minutes later the heart monitor fell silent, and Taylor died.

Annette stood up and collected her purse. She signed the requisite documents, then left the hospital. She stopped at a firearms store to pick up the Glock 19 she had purchased seven days ago, then headed back to her empty house.

* * *

A layer of dust covered everything in the house. The only places it had been disturbed was the path from the front door to the living room couch, and from the couch to the basement. The fridge was empty; she hadn't bothered to cook in weeks. Instead, the floor was littered with take-out containers. Some of them were starting to smell.

Annette waded through the debris, sending empty beer cans rattling across the floor. Descending into the basement, she hit a switch on the wall and fluorescent lights flickered to life. Like the hospital room, the air here was still, but not silent. It was hot, even with all the liquid cooling system she had rigged to run through the stacks. After the hours she had spent working down here, the noises didn't bother her anymore. The humming of the servers and gurgling of coolant flowing through the tubes had become almost comforting in a way, keeping her focused on her work.

There wasn't much floor space. A small table with a dual monitor setup on it was pushed against the far wall. Every other inch of space held stacks of high performance servers, routers, and other equipment, with multicoloured cat6a cables winding between them like the nerves of silicon creature. Some of the hardware looked commercially bought, but a lot of the devices had a more arcane quality to them. They looked home-brewed; strange components had been connected in inscrutable ways and shoved hastily into cardboard boxes before being hooked up to the greater web.

She made her way to the table, placing her purse on it before settling into the flimsy office chair. Resting her cast on the table, she used her left hand to type in her username and password. Even with just one working hand she could type with astonishing dexterity. With the same hand she then retrieved the circlet from her purse, and placed it into the cradle like interface she had built for it. Turning back to the keyboard, she opened the link.

wintermute$ sudo recover /media/circlet/taylor taylor connectome_sleeve_alpha: /  
password: *********

extracting data…  
successful  
rewiring connectome map…  
successful  
writing to disk…  
successful

conectome_sleeve_alpha:

id: taylor  
status: inactive  
size: 8.2 PB  
synapses: 1242 T

neural cluster corruption analysis:

long-term memory: low  
short-term memory: severe  
motor function (redundant): severe  
higher cognitive function : unknown (analysis failed)

wake connectome_sleeve_alpha "taylor" from stasis? [Y/n]

Annette's hand was steady as she hit the last key required to complete the process. She felt the systems react immediately. The hum of cooling fans kicked up into a high pitched whine. Around the room, embedded heatsinks reached threshold temperatures and sent cries for help to the monitoring system. The compressor beside her workstation began to pump coolant faster in response, but she could feel the temperature ticking upwards anyway. The lights began to flicker, like a scene from a bad horror movie. Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, but she didn't brush them away. Her eyes remained fixed on a line of text on the screen in front of her.

connectome_sleeve_alpha status: active

A soft voice came from the speakers, barely discernible over the cacophony of the machines. A voice she had spent hours synthesizing, painstakingly piecing together snippets from old home videos, voicemails, and messy, unreliable memory.

"H-hello?"

The breath caught in her throat. She couldn't speak, so she typed.

"Taylor, baby, it's me. It's mom."

"Mom? Where… where am I?"

"How do you feel, Taylor? Can you tell me what you remember?" She had to know. She had to know if this was still her daughter.

"I- I can't… we were… I don't know! Where am I, I can't feel anything!" There was a rising note of panic in her voice. "Mom, what's going on? Where's Dad? I can't see! What happened to me!?"

"There was an accident, baby. You were hurt, badly. But it's going to be okay, I promise. I'm going to make it better." She was crying now. The tears streamed down her face and splashed onto the keys.

"How- I can't _hear_ you, how are you talking to me? What's wrong with -"

The basement lights flickered again, then died. Red warning LEDS flared to life across the room. The main breaker had tripped; the system was running on emergency power now.

"Baby, I'm so sorry but you need to go to sleep now."

"What _was_ that? What's going on?"

"I'll explain everything soon, I promise. I'm going to make it all better. I love you, more than anything in the world."

With a quick command, Annette sent the system back into stasis. Then she dashed up the stairs, ignoring the burning pain where her right arm slammed into the bannister. Skidding into the kitchen, she wrenched open the electrical panel and reset the circuit breakers before heading back to the basement. One by one the warning lights died. When she was finally certain that the systems were stable again, she collapsed to the floor.

Annette allowed herself fifteen minutes to process things. She spent them curled up on the floor, sobbing and laughing. Then she got up and got to work. There was so much to be done. She needed a better power source, drawing from the mains wasn't viable. The connectome system had to be improved - already ideas were flooding in that would make it orders of magnitude faster and more energy efficient. She had to write interface modules so that Taylor would be able to see through cameras, hear through microphones, and access the internet. And once she had done that, she had to get started on the mobile biotic system. Her little owl would walk again, she vowed it.

She spent the rest of the evening engrossed in the work. She was so startled when the doorbell rang that she dropped the soldering iron she was holding, sending hot drops of tin-lead alloy flying. They burnt holes in her sweater. Swearing under her breath, Annette made her way up the stairs to get the door. She wasn't expecting anyone; if it was some door to door salesman or god-botherer, she'd tell them to fuck right off.

She opened the door a crack, and raised an eyebrow in surprise. There was a girl standing on her doorstep. She looked a little older than Taylor had, but was shorter, with wavy brown hair and freckles.

"Mrs. Hebert?"

"Yes? Who are you?

"It's me, uh, Panacea."

Annette looked her up and down again, and sure enough it was her. The teen hero had never kept her identity a secret, but it was still easy to miss her when she wasn't wearing her costume.

"Why are you here?" she asked, with increasing trepidation.

"I have a few questions. I was there when your daughter was first brought in. And when I used my power on her again today, I noticed a… discrepancy."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I'd like you to leave, please. Now."

The girl hesitated for a moment, then met her eyes with a hard gaze of her own.

"Of course. My apologies. I'll be reporting what I sensed to the PRT, then, and they will conduct an investigation if necessary. I won't bother you again."

She turned to leave. She had taken two steps before she heard Annette call out behind her.

"Wait," she said with a sigh. "You'd better come inside."


	2. Chapter 2

Amy sat gingerly at the edge on the couch. Her eyes darted across the room, taking in the dusty furniture and the trash that covered the floor. A TV and sound system had once stood in the corner - they had been stripped down, cannibalized for parts. Her gaze finally came to rest on the woman who sat in front of her, across a coffee table covered in notes.

The woman was tall, with unkempt dark hair. There was a smudge of ink on one cheek. She looked like she hadn't seen a mirror in some time. Almost instinctively, Amy began examining her for illnesses. She was still wearing the same sweater and jeans that she'd had on at the hospital, and they hung off her frame as if they were a couple of sizes too big - she had lost weight recently. Her face was pallid, and her nails had been bitten to the quick - possible signs of iron deficiency, and anxiety. Her right arm was in a cast, resting in a sling across her chest. There were dark circles around her eyes - sleep deprivation. All consistent with symptoms of grief.

But there was something else as well, something that had been absent in her this morning. A spark in her eyes, a certain cast to her face. She was fidgeting with nervous energy, absent-mindedly twirling a pen in her good hand.

"So. You have questions." Annette's voice was tense, hostile even. Yet, she looked so… broken. Amy found it hard to be intimidated by her.

"Yes. You were alone in your daughters room for approximately ten minutes this morning. You did something to her."

Annette was silent. They sat there, appraising one another.

"What is it that you think you know?"

"I saw it when I touched her. Her brain was destroyed at a cellular level."

"You didn't say anything in the hospital."

"So you _did_ -"

She was cut off before she could finish.

"Why are you here? What do you want?"

"I want to know what did you did. And why."

Amy didn't try to keep the accusatory tone out of her voice. The woman's face was darkened with anger, a scowl marring her features.

"Does it matter? She was dying. Even you couldn't save her."

The words were spat at Amy with a vehemence that shocked her. Annette was shaking now - with anger, or exhaustion, or both. At the same time, she seemed to be on the verge of tears.

In the back of Amy's mind, she felt a familiar, insidious thought stirring. _Yes, you could have, but you didn't. Because of your rules, you let them all die._ She felt the familiar tide of guilt and self-loathing rising, and tried to put it away.

She focused on the woman in front of her instead. She looked up into dark, pretty eyes and saw pain she couldn't comprehend. Amy wasn't sure what had happened that morning, but there was proof enough in that face. It was filled with love, and loss, and hurt. It wasn't the face of a monster.

"Look, I'm sorry," Amy said, putting her hands up in a placating gesture. "Your daughter-"

"Taylor." Annette said quietly. "Her name is Taylor."

"Taylor - was gone. No brain activity, no natural chance of recovery. Whatever you did, as far as I'm concerned, was a victimless crime. I'm not going to go to the PRT, okay? I'm willing to let sleeping dogs lie. I just…"

 _I don't know,_ she thought. _What_ am _I doing here?_

"I just want to understand what happened. I'm sorry if I came across as insensitive. Despite my line of work, I never developed much of a bedside manner."

Some of the tension seemed to leave Annette's face. She nodded, and took a deep, shaky breath to compose herself.

"If you're okay with it," Amy began slowly, "I'd like to heal your arm. As an apology."

Annette hesitated. She seemed to be deliberating something, and after a long moment she finally came to a decision. She nodded her consent. Amy leaned forward and took her left hand. The moment their hands touched, the details of her biology began flooding in. Amy saw the extra lobe in her brain.

She could feel Annette's eyes boring into her, but she didn't look up. She concentrated on the task at hand, knitting the broken bones together, reducing tissue inflammation, and restoring lost muscle mass. When she was finished, Amy lifted her hand and sat back.

You're a parahuman." She said it in a level voice, almost matter-of-factly. It wasn't really a surprise.

"Yes." Annette took another deep breath, then exhaled. "That's how I could do it."

"Do what?" Even as the question formed on her lips, Amy saw the obvious implication taking shape.

Annette didn't respond. She stood up, flexing her now healed but still cast-laden arm awkwardly and walked over to an open door, then turned to look back at Amy.

"Coming?"

Amy followed her. They descended a set of stairs into a basement lit by fluorescent lights. Banks of machines lined the walls all the way up to the low ceiling, filling the room with a low hum. There was barely enough space for the two of them to stand side by side. It was also noticeably warmer, but not unpleasantly so. It felt… cozy. Alive.

"What is this?" Amy asked, looking around in confusion. "I don't understand."

"She's here," said Annette, softly. "This is her."

Annette walked over to a small desk that held a monitor and keyboard. She typed a command into the shell and mysterious lines of numbers and text filled one screen. Amy hovered behind her awkwardly, trying not to touch anything. The basement had taken on a strange ambience; she almost felt like she was intruding in a sacred place.

"Can she hear us?" Amy whispered the words, although she wasn't quite sure why.

"No, she's sleeping right now," said Annette, with a fond smile on her face. "I hope her dreams are peaceful."

She tapped out another command, and a window opened on the screen. In it was the face of a girl. Pale, with delicate features. Thin lips formed a too-wide mouth, pursed into a little frown. Her eyes were closed. A few dark curls spilled in from the edges of the window. Amy thought it was a picture at first, but as she looked closer she saw small unconscious movements - a twitch of a brow, a flutter of eyelids.

"A passive visual interface," Annette explained. "She has no body, so it translates the signals from her mind onto a digital model."

"She's… alive?"

"Yes." Annette turned to face her. "I saved the most important part of her, the only part that truly matters."

From the desk she picked up a device, a silver circlet ringed with LEDs. "Neural digitizer. It imaged her brain at a subatomic level with perfect fidelity. This is what caused the damage you sensed." With the tap of a few keys, she brought up diagrams and schematics on the screens. "A digital connectome to host engrams. Synthetic neuromorphic circuitry that emulates brain matter, to allow for an emergent and self-modifying consciousness. A thousand other devices and software modules that will let her _live again."_

Amy looked around in wonder. This grungy little basement, these machines all around her held the mind of a _living person_ right now. All this had been built in a month by a crippled, grief stricken woman who had just lost her entire family.

"You must really love her." She blurted out the words without thinking, and immediately felt stupid for saying them. She met Annette's gaze momentarily and then looked away, avoiding the odd look that the other woman was directing at her.

"Of course. The moment I triggered, I knew what I was capable of. So I did what I had to. Any mother would." There was edge to the statement, a heavier implication left unsaid.

Her simple conviction sent a pang of bitterness through Amy. Bitterness and longing. She dealt with it the way she always dealt with issues from the dark side of her mind; she ignored it.

"How… is she? Even if I healed - could heal brain injuries, some damage just can't be undone. Some things are just lost."

"She's hurt," Annette said, her face darkening. A look of fury and helplessness flashed across it. "Parts of her cerebellum and prefrontal cortex were damaged, and her motor skills are gone. In a biological body, she'd be a paraplegic. There will be gaps in her short-term memory. And maybe worse. I can't say for sure."

Amy patted her on the shoulder awkwardly, trying to offer some semblance of comfort. Her effort was rewarded with a small smile.

"I'm doing what I can for her. She's healing right now, as she sleeps. The systems emulate enhanced neuroplasticity - the brain is an incredibly resilient organ, it can do a lot to heal itself. Taylor's is digital now, and in some ways that makes things a lot easier. Biological limitations don't matter to her anymore."

They stood in silence for a few moments, with the mind of a sleeping girl all around them. Annette fiddled with a panel of switches and flashing lights. At times it almost looked like she was caressing the equipment.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Amy asked, after a little while. "You don't think they would have let you go through with it?"

Annette grimaced. "You know better than most how many issues there are surrounding parahuman abilities and medicine. Maybe one other person on the planet can comprehend the things I've built. No, they wouldn't let me go through with it, and that's before we get to the philosophical considerations of what this is. And Taylor was running out of time."

Amy nodded. It made sense. "Okay," she said. "So what happens next?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You've brought her back from the brink of death, but she's still stuck here, in these machines. And out there, she's dead. There's a body that has to be buried. You can't go back to living a normal life."

"I know." Annette looked away, and once again Amy noticed how utterly exhausted she seemed. "I know. Everything's changed. To be honest, I haven't thought about the future, I haven't had _time_ to think about what this really means. I do know what happens next, though. I made a promise, Taylor's going to walk again."

"You're going to make her a body?"

"Yes. I'm going to give her her life back. All of it."

"I think…" Amy hesitated. "I think I may be able to help." As surprise flashed across Annette's face, she continued. "My power is more than just healing. I can shape biomatter. I can help you remake her body as it was."

Annette stared at her, and she held her gaze steadily. Amy could see the emotions warring across her face. Interest, confusion, suspicion, and wary optimism.

"Why?" she asked finally. "Why does this matter to you?"

Amy shifted uncomfortably as she considered the question. She didn't have an answer, not really. When she put in overtime at the hospital, it was to ease the never-ending river of guilt that defined her waking moments. This was something different. There was sympathy, sure, but Amy had never deluded herself into thinking she was a particularly kind person. No, there was something else driving her.

"I don't know," she admitted, "but I want to help. Really."

Wary optimism won out.

"Okay."

As Amy left the rundown little house in the shabby part of the Docks, she felt lighter. There it was, the emotion that was driving her. It was something she hadn't felt in years, but it filled her now, buoying her up like a hot air balloon. She felt excited.

* * *

After the girl left, Annette made her way to the living room and flopped onto the couch on her back. She stayed there for a while, staring at the ceiling, just letting her mind drift. Despite the haze of exhaustion, she felt better. A lot better.

Since the accident, she felt like she'd been in a tunnel. A dark place, with nothing but pain and loss around her. After the trigger, she'd seen a faint light in the distance. A glimmer of hope. She knew she had to reach it, and then _nothing else mattered._ Now that she had, and the way forward was… well, not clear, but there _was_ a way forward, where before there had been nothing. The darkness was still there, all around her. Maybe it wasn't quite as dark anymore, though.

Annette felt a smile of genuine happiness play across her lips. She sat up. There were things to do. She walked to kitchen to get some dinner. The cabinets were empty but for two packets of instant noodles. Spicy Chicken, or Vegetable. Shaking her head in disgust, she grabbed the Spicy Chicken and silently swore to go get actually food tomorrow.

While her 'meal' whirred around in the microwave, Annette located a pair of heavy shears and got to work on removing the now useless cast. After a couple of awkward fumbles, she managed to cut all the way through it. Her arm popped free, and she flexed it this way and that, working out the pins and needles. Right on cue, the microwave beeped. She retrieved the bowl, added the sachet of 'flavouring' to it, stuck a fork in, and headed to the basement with it.

Intellectually, she knew there was no reason to keep working, but she couldn't bring herself to go to sleep just yet. While the noodles cooled, she started going over her notes. She had sketched out basic plans for efficiency improvements, miniaturization of the connectome sleeve, and other technologies. A couple of prototypes already lay half assembled on the table in front of her.

Annette blew on the hot noodle soup, and then took a bite. She sputtered slightly as she burned her tongue, and then set it aside and got to work. The rest of the room seemed to bleed away as she slipped comfortably into a state of extreme focus. As her fingers flew over the keyboard, screens of code flashed past for fractions of seconds. One screen remained unchanged, displaying the visage of a sleeping girl.

As she worked, some detached part of her mind marvelled at the speed, the sheer skill and dexterity that she was displaying. It was early morning when her mental concentration finally broke down. She clicked a final component into place, and emerged blinking away sleep from her eyes. Once again, she called up the monitoring program. Once again, her hand was steady as she executed the command that would wake Taylor.

This time, the reaction was more subdued. With the improvements in place, the sudden surge in processor load was handled deftly, and without issue. On the screen that displayed the face, eyelashes fluttered open. Annette's eyes wavered between the screen and the articulated webcam mounted above it - Taylor's _real_ eyes. A long silence stretched between them.

"Taylor."

Annette's voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper. She knew what was happening right now. She could see the emotions playing across that beautiful face on the screen. Confusion, fear, and ultimately realization. The system - _Taylor_ \- was completely online now, and with that came an intuitive, instinctive awareness of her own structure.

"Baby, say something. Please."

"Mom, I…" The voice was shaky, heavy with emotion.

"I love you, Mom."


End file.
